Midterm Flashcards
Scholasticism
The philosophical systems and speculative tendencies of various medieval Christian thinkers, who, working against a background of fixed religious dogma, sought to solve philosophical problems with intellect, realism and nominalism. Merged classical thinking and Christian doctrine. Science still not applied to the mind.
Roger Bacon (1620)
Father of scientific method
Not focused in religion, goal was to improve life/humanity
Materialism
Belief that one type of “stuff” makes up the universe. Not liked by the Catholic Church, who thought it was anti-religious
Dualism
- Separation of the mind and body
- Offered some explanation of how cognition was not materialistic
Bell-Magendie Law (1811)
- Charles Bell
- Spine is the cause of all sensation and movement
- Per church: physical explanation for souls
Law of specific nerve energies
- Johannes Müller
- The mind has access to things that are only in the nerves (not real world)
- The contents of the mind have no qualities in common with environmental objects but serve only as arbitrary signs or markers of those objects.
Applying Materialism to Mental Life: 2 Interpretations
- Materialism + Evolution → the adaption of the brain over the lifetime of the individuals (Herbert Spencer, Herman Ebbinghaus)
- Materialism + Methods → Consciousness as a subject matter (William Wundt)
3 schools of Psychology in late 19th century
Structuralists, Wurtzberg School, Act psychology
Structuralists
- Wundt,
- Method: introspection
- Focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components
Wurtzberg School
- Kulpe
- Methods: mixed.
- Hypothesizes existence of special states of consciousness—“thoughts”—which cannot be reduced to the sensory content.
Act psychology
- Brentatno
- More philosophical than empirical
- The mind is a symbol system
William Wundt
- Recognized as the founder of psychology
- Voluntarism (Wundt’s experimental psychology
- Volkerpsychologie (Wundt’s non-experimental psychology)
Voluntarism
- Wundt’s experimental psychology
- Meant to indicate voluntary, active, and willful nature of the mind
- Key was Apperception
Apperception
- Active intentional process involving will
- Mechanism of creative synthesis by which psychical elements and compounds are synthesized into experience
- Key to Wundt’s Voluntarism theory
Volkerpsychologie
- Wundt’s non experimental psychology (cultural psychology)
- Precursor to social psychology cultural psychology, and personality
Wundt’s goal of psychology
To analyze experience in terms of component elements and compounds
Two types of experience
- Mediate experience: domain of natural science
- Immediate experience: domain of psychology
Experimental self-observation
- Wundt’s self described experimental methd
- Observer presented with stimulus condition and instructed to be in a state of readiness
Tridimensional theory of feeling
Wundt’s theory that all emotions take place on three separate continua: pleasant-unpleasant, tension-relaxation, excitement-depression
Ebbinghaus
- Forgetting curve
- Wanted to study associations as they were being formed
- Nonsense syllables method
Systematic experimental introspection
- Observers would experience what ever stimuli or events they were supposed to experience and then provide comprehensive account of mental processes
- Pioneered by Kulpe
Imageless Thought
- Pioneered by Kulpe
- Observers reported forming images of weights when lifted them but reported there was no sensory or imaginal content present when they made judgments
Gestalt Psychology
- Koffka, Wertheimer, and Kholer
- Sought to explain perceptions in terms of gestalts rather than by analyzing their constituents.
Behaviorism
- Goal to predict behavior or show how classical and operational conditions can account for behavior
- Methods cannot be subjective, introspection as a method in invalid
- Pioneered by Watson
Neobehavioraism
- These psychologists were interested in theory, focusing their research on learning and motivation
- Neobehaviorism (muscle twitch psych)-reflex is a functional relation
- Hull, Skinner, Tolman
Introspection Method Goal
To find the basic units of mental life underlying consciousness
Cognitive Method Goal
To figure out which representations and which processes the mind uses
What was Behaviorism unable to account for?
Ethology and Language
Cognition Movement
- The goal is to account for behavior, but the focus is on mental life as unconscious
- Method: Explanation = processes that manipulate internal representations
Principles of Cognition
-Symbols replace S-R/conditioning as the unit of thought
- Mental life is unconscious
- Intervening variables could exist
- Existence of hypothetical constructs (e.g. strategy, mental images)
What was Cognition unable to account for?
How can we avoid “tricking” ourselves if we are allowed to make up what a mental representation is?
Four positions on cognition
1. Study computation without the brain
2. Study computation but leave out cognition
3. Start with mapping theory
4. Brain is involved in construct development
Informational description
- Related to 4th position on cognition
- Mental events can be described in terms of “input” “operation” and “output”
Recursive decomposition
- Related to 4th position on cognition
- You can decompose each even into a more basic event, but at some point you hit a primitive that is not further reducible at a functional level
How did cognitive psychologists respond to the issue of “made up” constructs
- Neural constraints
-Formal models - Evolution
- Behavioral measures
Two types of long-term memory
Type - enduring representation
Token - duplicate of the representation you create to manipulate in your mind
Information Theory
- Quantitative approach to psychology
- Was meant to be a way of thinking of human information processing that was going to constrain theory
- Logarithmic relationship between information and reaction time
- Way of measuring information irrespective of content
- Valuable as one way of describing the environment
- Mapping theory
Donders Subtraction Technique
Perception and motor time = time required for simple task
Discrimination time = time for discrimination task minus simple task
Choice time = time for choice task minus discrimination time.
Miller’s Law
The number of objects an average human can hold in short term memory is 7 + 2
Key Features of Cognitive Strategy
- Develop alternate methods of processing
- e.g. search (serial: exhaustive, serial: self-terminating, parallel)
- Derive signature predictions of each models
- Obtain data that allow comparison
Mental Chronometry
- Discrete stimulus = Task C - Task A
- Response Selection = Task B - Task C
Sternberg’s Additive Factors
Use positive sets to as base stimuli
Subject responds if a number is in the set
Step 1: Specify a model
Step 2: Identify the stages with different IV and DVs
Independence problem in additive factors
Method assumes that each step of the model is independent
Signal Detection Theory
Testing how far a patient falls from the line between hit rate and false alarm rate
Types of Cognitive Methods
- EEG
- Single Cell Recording
- fMRI
- Testing patients with lesions to the brain
Single Cell Recording
- Records the activity of a single neuron in an animal
- Method: place a wire through a hole made in skull
- Benefits: precise temporal information and location of information (after repeated testing)
- Issues: highly invasive-not done on humans